The Department of Labor has released a mobile app that monitors the heat index at worksites. The app, available in English and Spanish, combines heat index data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration with the user’s location to determine necessary protective measures.

The app is designed for devices using an Android platform, and versions for BlackBerry and iPhone users will be released shortly. To download it, visit http://go.usa.gov/KFE.

Click here for more information and to read the Department Of Labor's full announcement.

ABOUT THE PLAY: In a suburban subdivision with identical houses, parents find their teenagers addicted to an online horror video game. The game setting? A subdivision with identical houses. The goal? Smash through an army of zombies to escape the neighborhood for good. But as the line blurs between virtual and reality, both parents and players realize that fear has a life of its own.

For more information or to download the audition form, visit our website atwww.LVLT.org

Global Political Cartoons: Libyan Rebel Street Art

In western Libya, pictures of Muammar Gaddafi still adorn public buildings and public spaces, the residue of the cult of personality that’s been part of Gaddafi’s forty-year rule. But in the rebel-held east, Libyans have turned the idea on its head. There you can see street art that mocks Gaddafi. Some turn the colonel into a clown. Others suggest he’s a miser or a coward. Rory Mulholland, a journalist with Agence France Presse, spent three weeks in the rebel-held areas of eastern Libya. He’s started taking pictures of the street art with his iPhone. Here he narrates a slideshow of some of the images he photographed.

Older people often have difficulty understanding conversation in a crowd. Like everything else, our hearing deteriorates as we age.

There are physiological reasons for this decline: We lose tiny hair cells that pave the way for sound to reach our brains. We lose needed neurons and chemicals in the inner ear, reducing our capacity to hear.

So how can you help stave off that age-related hearing loss? Try embracing music early in life, research suggests.

"If you spend a lot of your life interacting with sound in an active manner, then your nervous system has made lots of sound-to-meaning connections" that can strengthen your auditory system, says Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University.

Musicians focus extraordinary attention on deciphering low notes from high notes and detecting different tonal qualities. Kraus has studied younger musicians and found that their hearing is far superior to that of their non-musician counterparts.

So Kraus wondered: Could that musical training also help fend off age-related hearing loss? To find out, she assembled a small group of middle-aged musicians and non musicians, aged 45-65. She put both groups through a series of tests measuring their ability to make out and repeat a variety of sentences spoken in noisy background environments.

Turns out, the musicians were 40 percent better than non-musicians at tuning out background noise and hearing the sentences, as Kraus reported in PloS ONE. The musicians were also better able to remember the sentences than the non-musicians — and that made it easier for them to follow a line of conversation. After all, Kraus says, in order to listen to a friend in a noisy restaurant, you need to be able to recall what was said a few seconds ago in order to make sense of what you're hearing right now.

The take-home message: If you're an older musician, don't stop playing. And if you gave it up, it may be time to dust off the old violin.

As for picking up an instrument for the first time in mid-life, there's no evidence yet that it can help maintain hearing. But the world of rodents offers some hope: Onerecent study found that intense auditory training of older rats resulted in significant improvement in their ability to hear high-pitched sounds. It also boosted their levels of brain chemicals crucial for hearing.

Of course, rats' ears, though similar to humans, are not the same. More research is needed to find out if old human ears can also be taught new tricks.

The 1946 musical Sweet Bye and Bye was an unmitigated disaster and never made it to Broadway. The show closed in Philadelphia and seemed to be lost forever — until the score was rediscovered in a New Jersey warehouse in 1986.

The Help" needs no help. The drama "The Help" about the relationships between black maids and their white employers in Mississippi in the early 1960s, took the top spot at the box office this past weekend. The movie, based on a best-selling book, took in $20.5 million. That's a drop of only 21% from the previous weekend. "The Help" easily beat the debut of "Conan the Barbarian," which may be retitled "Conan the Meek" after making just $10 million. That was way off what from what was projected by so-called box office experts. Also premiering was "Spy Kids: All the Time in the World in 4D," which took in S12 million, making it the hot new movie of the weekend. Box office coverage from the Los Angeles Times, Deadline Hollywood, and Movie City News.

Caveat emptor. Bids for the online video site Hulu are expected Wednesday. The company, whose owners include Walt Disney Co., News Corp. and Comcast, are shopping the popular site. However, while lots of companies are kicking the tires -- Google, Yahoo, DirecTV, Dish Network -- how many will really want to buy it remains to be seen. The big issue is how long and at what price will the parent companies provide their content to Hulu once they no longer have a stake in it. A look at the situation from the Wall Street Journal.

Saturation. The 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks is upon us and television is going into overdrive to commemorate the event. Unfortunately, as Variety columnist Brian Lowry notes, subtlety is not the medium's strong point and there is a risk of "trivializing the event." Writes Lowry: "By dissecting the day from every conceivable angle -- CNN alone has scheduled four documentaries; National Geographic Channel will devote a full week to it -- the resulting din has become a noise-cancelling exercise." Advertisers, says Advertising Age, are also trying to figure out how to cash in on the coverage without being tacky. Good luck with that. As one who worked downtown across the street from the World Trade Center back then at a different newspaper, a quiet reflection accompanied by Bruce Springsteen's "Into the Fire" and "The Rising" is all I will require.

The place to be. Did you make it to Disney's hypefest known as D23? If not, here is a look at everything you missed at the company's in-house version of Comic-Con, including the lowdown on new Pixar movies and the Muppet film from Vulture.

Stop the presses! As if there needed to be another indictment of how trivial television news has become, the Hollywood Reporter looks at how broadcast and cable news outlets covered the wedding of Kim Kardashian. Lets just say the word "ignore" doesn't seem to have been used in this case.

Bet the ranch. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch isn't totally distracted by the phone-hacking scandal eating away at his media empire. While much of his staff battles investigators probing into how the company operates, he quietly sold a family home in Carmel, Calif., for $17.8 million. According to the Telegraph, which broke the news, the 80-year-old Murdoch's third wife, Wendi, motivated the sale. On a side note, if in the unlikely scenario that the hacking debacle brings down News Corp. or knocks the Murdoch family from power, Wendi has a side career as a jewelry maker she can fall back on, notes the Los Angeles Times.

Get a room already! Are you a high-powered Hollywood player looking for an upscale place to take your mistress without your wife finding out? Then check out the New York Times piece on the oh so classy and discreet Hollywood Sunset Hotel where maître d’hôtel Dmitri Dmitrov stands guard. The Sunset Tower is apparently an obsession for the New York paper. In late 2009, it did a feature on the hotel being the place for movers and shakers and in 2010 it offered up this piece about the hotel's Christmas cards.

About Me

Actor, Casting Director, Director, Broadcaster, Writer, Singer, Artistic
Director, Dramatur, Producer, Professor, Coach, Husband, Grandfather, Marketing
Professional and life long student Art Lynch joined the staff of John Robert
Powers in 1999. Lynch is also an adjunct professor at the Community College of
Southern Nevada, the Morning Edition Weekend Host for Nevada Public Radio and
one of 67 individuals who represent 126,000 actors as a member of the Board of
Directors of the Screen Actors Guild. He is the past president of the Nevada
Branch of the Screen Actors Guild and of the Professional Audio/Visual Communications
Association. A resident of Nevada since 1984, Lynch has an MA in Communications
from UNLV and a BA in Theater, Speech and Mass Communications from the
University of Illinois, Chicago. He is currently pursuing post-graduate studies
in theater, education and the entertainment industry. Art Lynch studied and
practiced the craft of acting in Chicago and California before settling in
Nevada. With his wife Laura, Art owned and operated a successful marketing
company with national clientele. Art was personally responsible for casting and
directing over 1,000 commercials and industrials, as well as assisting on film
and television projects in many ways. His career also includes earning awards
as a wire service, magazine and broadcast journalist. He is most proud,
however, of his daughters. Ann is a PhD in neuroscience and Beth is the proud
mother of his grandchildren, Evan and Elijah.

Short Film Festival

DISCLAIMER

The resources listed herein are posted for informational purposes only. The authors of this blog are not affiliated with, nor do they endorse, sponsor or guarantee any of the above resources or any of the information, advice, services or other resources obtained through these resources. All information and content on this blog is for informational purposed only and not to be taken as legally vetted journalism or endorsed in any way by the authors of this blog, the Screen Actors Guild, College of Southern Nevada, Casting Call Entertainment, Boulder City Parks and Recreation or any other entity implied or mentioned on this blog. No guarantee of any kind is made as to the accuracy or suitability of these resources or the qualifications of any companies or individuals affiliated with them.